Francisco Monterde

Francisco de Asís Monterde García Icazbalceta (August 9, 1894 in Mexico City – February 27, 1985 in Mexico City) was a prolific and multifaceted Mexican writer whose career spanned over fifty years. He was an important promoter of the arts and culture in Mexico in the years following the Revolution.

His parents were Francisco de Asís Ángel María Monterde y Adalid and María Trinidad de los Dolores García Icazbalceta y Travesi de Monterde, aristocrats who both died when he was still young. He studied dentistry but never practiced. In 1924 he founded and edited the short-lived Mexican avant-garde cultural magazine Antena. In 1925 he famously deciphered a letter that conquistador Hernán Cortés left written in code. He wrote, in addition to plays and poetry, various novels set in colonial Mexico, a genre known as colonialista. In 1930 he created in conjunction with Alejandro Gómez Arias, the department of Mexican and Hispano-American Literature at the National Preparatory School. He was a founding member in 1938 of the Asociación Mexicana de Críticos de Teatro (AMCT). He belonged to the "grupo de los siete autores" (group of seven authors), a circle of dramatists active in the 1950s who revived the theatrical arts in Mexico. He was an admirer of José Juan Tablada and an imitator of the latter's haiku-inspired poetry (a style at the time referred to as haikai). He held important posts in the Ministry of Public Education. He was from 1922-65 a professor of Spanish and Latin-American literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), his alma mater (M.A. 1941, Ph.D. 1942). He served as subdirector of the Biblioteca Nacional de México; as head librarian of the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia (1931); and as director of the Imprenta Universitaria de la UNAM (UNAM University Press). He was director of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores from 1973-85.

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